A growing number of vehicles are equipped with a voice recognition (VR) system for receiving an audio input from a driver. The voice recognition system generally enables a hassle-free and hands-free operation of certain features of the vehicle to minimize driver distraction. The VR system includes a VR microphone which is installed in the vehicle and is positioned proximate to the driver to receive the voice input. In most cases, the microphone is positioned near a rear view mirror of the vehicle.
The VR system generally comes with a variety of challenges. For example, the VR system may be susceptible to environmental noise (i.e., engine/road noise, etc.). Such environmental noise may affect the quality of the voice input when provided to the microphone of the VR system. This condition negatively impacts the voice input which may lead the VR system to incorrectly recognize the voice input and lead to false positives.
An interior of the vehicle is generally noisy and this can be attributed to the vehicle cabin acting as an acoustic cavity thereby increasing the intensity of the noise that propagates from the engine and the road via chassis interaction or any other environmental noise. Various active noise cancellation (ANC) implementations which include error microphones have been used to reduce the environmental noise in vehicle cabins. Such implementations may reduce the noise at spots directly under a particular error microphone but not globally within the cabin. Speakers in the vehicle may produce a secondary noise field to cancel out primary noise in and around the error microphone. However, the error microphone may not be positioned near the VR microphone and this condition enables noise to propagate to the VR microphone.